Jude Law’s Counter-Terrorist Thriller “The Order” to Release in Venice

VENICE LIDO, Italy – Like a classic 1970s American action film, “The Order” chronicles the FBI’s hunt for murderous white supremacists and other local terrorists in the Pacific Northwest.

Director Justin Kurzel’s film, starring Jude Law, premiered in competition at the Venice International Film Festival on Saturday night.

The Order was a real-life white supremacist group active in the United States in the 1980s. While the specific events in the film took place 40 years ago, “the relevance is unfortunately self-evident,” said Law, who also produced.

While Law’s Terry Husk is “a composite of a number of law enforcement officers who tracked down the leader of the Order, Bob Matthews, the characterization we were trying to create,” said screenwriter Zach Baylin, “was someone who was feeling the toll of his career and the fight against these groups and the amount of sacrifice he had experienced in the pursuit of this kind of justice.”

“What I found interesting was playing someone,” said Law, 51, “who thought the battle was won.”

“Something about this character, talking to Jude about how different this was for him, really excited me,” Kurzel said. “He had a way of coming in that was grounded. We were talking about Gene Hackman and Paul Newman, how extraordinary they were with characters who failed — but you adored them.”

Laws, a worldly-wise FBI agent, had spent years busting the Mafia in New York. When he arrived in Idaho to reopen a shuttered FBI office, “he felt like he had done his hardest work. But his biggest task was still ahead of him,” Kurzel said. “You could say he had a lot of work to do.”

“We wanted,” Law said, “the question to remain: Can he survive this?”

Law wanted a “lived-in” quality. “There was a lot of talk about facial hair,” he said. “But every cop I interviewed had a moustache. So it was a given that I had a moustache. I think I hid behind that.”

While neo-Nazis rob, kill and spread hatred, Jurnee Smollett, the aggressive FBI agent in charge, is the only black character in the film.

“One of the things that Zach, Justin and I talked about was these cases where I was interviewing a lot of black, Hispanic former cops and how these cases were very personal. You take the work home with you,” Smollett said.

“And work is everything! It’s their identity in life and they’ve made sacrifices to do that. Because I play a black woman in a cis male environment, there were so many beautiful questions.

“What I love about Justin’s approach is ‘Less is more’. Art allows you to reflect society and explore the ugliness and darkness to learn from it.”

Vertical Gives “The Order” a Limited Theatrical Release on December 6